The Newsnight presenter talks about her work-life balance, writing her first
novel, and Jeremy Paxman's imminent departure from the current affairs
programme

Days before my meeting with Kirsty Wark, I am in a first-year flap at the prospect of an audience with the Head Girl. Where civilians on a bad hair day might wonder rhetorically, “What would Beyoncé do?” or “How would Jennifer Aniston play this?”, female journalists invariably regard Wark as the benchmark by which we shall be judged and invariably found wanting.

But you know, that’s all right, because there’s only one Kirsty Wark, doughty Scots denizen of Newsnight. Less petulant than Paxman, but no less formidable: she is incisive, exacting and, once she’s got a government minister between her teeth, as tenacious as a Border terrier.

So what, in Martha Gellhorn’s name, am I doing asking her about handbags? She often buys duplicates and leaves one at the family home in Glasgow and the other in London. Oughtn’t we to be discussing proper subjects like, I don’t know, female genital mutilation?

“But we both already know what we think about female genital mutilation,” responds Wark, 59, magnanimously, in her familiar Glasgow drawl. “We don’t know what we think about each other’s handbags. I remember once being in a Newsnight editorial meeting talking about Lebanon and the conversation suddenly segueing into, 'Oooh, nice shoes, where are they from?’ and then, in the blink of an eye, back to Lebanon again. The men were nonplussed, but women are perfectly able to dip in and out like that.”

Multi-tasking would be the cliché, but Wark isn’t a woman for cliché. Although she is a woman for multi-tasking. Alongside her day job she has, in recent years, emerged as a more rounded person. A nifty cook, she reached the last round of Celebrity Masterchef: “I was just pleased to make it to the finals,” she says, entirely unconvincingly.

A razor-sharp sense of mischief was revealed when we saw her, dancing, with deadpan hilarity, to Thriller as the Newsnight credits rolled on Hallowe’en. Recently she presented a powerful one-off documentary Blurred Lines: The New Battle of the Sexes and spoke at the Hay literary festival about work-life balance and motherhood (which, truth be told, was a bit of a touchy-feely eye-opener for such a confirmed bluestocking).

And now Wark has just written her first novel, The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle, a lyrical, truthful, contemplative book set on the Scottish island of Arran rather than in the sexy purlieus of Broadcasting House. It begins disconcertingly slowly, only to grow, imperceptibly, like bindweed round the reader, captivating them and then (and I say this by way of a compliment) practically throttling them in with a denoument so shocking that I could barely speak afterwards.

In fact, I finish it in a nearby coffee shop just minutes before turning up at her central London pied-à-terre (glass walls with rooftop views of churches and the London Eye and a kitchen clean enough to perform open-heart surgery in).

“How could you, Kirsty? How could you do that?” I cry as she opens the door. She is tiny and luminously attractive in dark skinny jeans, flat pumps, matelot stripes and a hugely covetable Chanel pearl-and-enamel costume pendant that looks vintage enough to have been wrenched from the slender neck of Mary Queen of Scots herself.

Wark puts a steadying hand on my arm and beams with delight at my literary discombobulation. “I know! I know!” she says, as though the fate of her creation were entirely independent of her. The plot is that of three women occupying very different moments in time, whose lives unexpectedly diverge.

One character is in her nineties, her memories as vivid as HD, another is in her early sixties and struggling to retain her voice as early-onset Alzheimers robs her of herself. The third, a workaholic singleton in her mid-thirties, uncovers her future as she sifts through the past.

Isn’t it something of an, ahem, well-worn truism that men tend to write novels that encompass the sweep of history and epoch-making events, whereas women gravitate to home and hearth, I ask Wark (quite bravely, I think).

“I believe you can have a window on to the wider world from a domestic perspective,” she says. “A small canvas can deliver big insights, and I wanted to write not just about the complexity of mother-daughter relationships but the experience of a generation of women who may have confined themselves, as Elizabeth did, to a quiet island life, but who nevertheless had a richness of experience and a questioning, intellectual life that they never shouted about so younger people would never guess at.”

The shoutiness of modern life is something that Wark, paradoxically, takes issue with. Her husband, Alan Clements, is head of content at STV. Her son James, 22, wants to become an actor and daughter Catriona, 23, a journalist. Both are bound for New York in the autumn.

The family base is in Scotland, to which Wark – and, increasingly Clements – commutes. They are constantly in touch with one another; by any standards, they are a media-savvy lot. And yet she worries about technology.

“I know I want to have my cake and eat it here, because without Skype enabling me to talk to the kids, I would have been adrift; we text several times a day; I tweet,” she sighs. “But I do worry about the way the online world isn’t an adjunct of life for people under 20; it is life. Everything is out there, leaving no space for privacy or intimacy or even civility. Social media offers people with anger issues yet another platform to vent, and it’s pretty unedifying.”

History graduate Wark joined BBC Scotland straight from Edinburgh University. Initially she was involved on the production side, but was talent-spotted when she was asked to sit on the presenter’s chair and ad-lib while the lighting was adjusted. She graduated to network television and Breakfast Time, and was one of the first reporters to cover the Lockerbie disaster. By then it was clear that her career would be based in London, but when she started her family she was adamant that the children would be brought up in Glasgow.

“Once that was decided, I just had to take the emotional stuff and the commuting on the chin,” she says, downplaying the inevitable guilt, however misplaced, as the children’s father picked up the slack, as did the nanny, who stayed 15 years and has become a family friend.

“Yes, there are sacrifices, but what is feminism about if not being able to choose your own path?” she says. At the mention of her namesake, Kirstie Allsopp, who has been urging girls to put marriage and babies before careers, down-to-earth Wark raises her eyes heavenward. But then she says firmly: “Women should be able to do what they want without judgment, that is the status quo we must all aim to achieve.”

Women, of course, can be their own worst enemies in this respect. While Wark is adamant she has never personally encountered sexism or even chauvinism at the BBC, she concedes she was bullied.

“The only person who ever bullied me was a woman,” she says. “She was older and picked on me; nothing was ever good enough. Later we ended up working together again; the first thing she did was apologise.”

So did Wark tear a strip off her? Demand, if not retribution, then at least an explanation?

“No,” she shrugs. “I accepted her apology and we moved on. As I’ve got older I’m a lot more tolerant, a lot more accepting of the fact that people’s lives can be complicated and make them act in ways that they shouldn’t.”

Of Jeremy Paxman, whose departure from Newsnight was greeted with more keening and lamenting than if the ravens had defected from the Tower, Wark is tellingly matter-of-fact. "Jeremy's great and I admire him enormously. I have no doubt that whatever he goes on to do will be a success, but in practical terms his departure won't impact on me. We don't inhabit the same universe because we're never in the studio at the same time."

Wark’s thoughts are on the future and it is clear that she believes the politicos’ must-watch programme has undergone something of a renaissance with ex-Guardian journalist Ian Katz as editor.

“The people I work with are so intelligent and creative; we’re getting big interviews again, because I think the parties realise there’s lot to be gained from a rigorous interview,” says Wark. “It was Michael Forsyth who told me that rigour puts a politician on their mettle, and if they know their stuff and are telling the truth and not seeking to obfuscate, they do better than in a soft sofa interview.”

Where Paxo’s stock-in-trade has been repetition without deviation or hesitation, Wark is more likely to take the “hoist by their own petard” option. “If someone doesn’t reply to a perfectly legitimate line of questioning, their silence speaks volumes about them.”

Having signed a two-book deal, Wark has already started work on her next novel, even as she does the rounds banging the drum for her debut, which appears to have an extraordinary effect on readers.

“Everywhere I go, people from all walks of life and of all ages come up to me and tell me the most incredible stories of love and loss and coincidence and fate.”

That Wark listens to them and engages with them and retells their stories with wonder speaks volumes about her. Which is exactly why we’ve made her Head Girl.